Last year I spent a few months as an intern for a major national arts publication, which shall remain nameless because that makes me look cooler thanLast year I spent a few months as an intern for a major national arts publication, which shall remain nameless because that makes me look cooler than if I just blurted it out. I had a few regular duties at this (unpaid) gig, the primary one being transcription of interviews. You might think that transcribing is drudgery, and in a sense it is. But if the interview subject was interesting—and, given this publication's bent and cachet, most of the subjects were interesting—it provided a rare glimpse into the messy vocal raw material of an interview, as opposed to the cleaned-up, translated-into-printed-words final product.

One of the most fascinating interviews I transcribed was with none other than Bret Easton Ellis. The occasion of the interview was the release of the film version of Ellis' The Informers, which, according to Ellis and just about everyone else who saw it, was pretty much of a misbegotten failure. (Ellis co-wrote the script, but the film was apparently hacked to bits in the editing room; his tone toward the film was one of aggrievement, and he insisted that the longer, un-fucked-with cut of the film—it was supposed to be a sprawling, Altman-esque epic—was good. It's doubtful we'll ever see it. I'm actually not sure how much of this stuff made it into the printed interview, since some of it was supposed to be off the record.) Listening to the interview was an odd experience, because Ellis is an odd man. He was very personable and friendly toward the interviewer, moreso than any other subject I transcribed—he seemed to believe that he was just shooting the shit with this critic over the phone rather than giving an interview, and consequently he didn't seem to care much about staying on topic or saying things that made sense. As on his Twitter feed, he mostly talked about movies. Apparently a huge cinephile, Ellis kept prodding the interviewer with questions about which films he'd seen lately, what did he think of film X, how much he hated film Y, etc. My favorite moment went like this:

Interviewer: {Thoughtful, penetrating question about Ellis' work}

Ellis: {Loooooooooooooooong pause}

Ellis: Did you see Monsters vs. Aliens?

I shit you not, folks. I can't remember if Ellis eventually answered the question but I do know he went off on how much he loved Monsters vs. Aliens for a few minutes. And I loved him for that. But sometimes he was cogent and he said some smart, interesting shit—he went off an inspired riff about aesthetics vs. morality, and while he was ostensibly talking about the Irish-hunger-strike film Hunger his comments obviously applied to his own work. And he was really, really nice. Like, weirdly nice. He has this reputation for bad-boy nihilism or misogyny or whatever, but the guy I listened to seemed like way more of a mensch than, say, Jonathan "Fuck You" Franzen. Having never read a word by the man, I went home that day liking him.

Just the other day, over a year after the events related above, I went back to the offices of the aforementioned major national arts publication to interview for a copy editor position. Afterwards, not feeling too great about how it went, I consoled myself by hanging out in the used bookstore around the corner, where I walked out with copies of American Psycho and Less Than Zero. In fact, the inspiration for this purchase was not so much a sense-memory recall of last year's Ellis transcript as it was the recent GR review of American Psycho by Brian. That review was totally badass, and made me want to give this controversial writer the old college try.

So, Less Than Zero: 200 pages in the company of the overprivileged, morally vacuous sons and daughters of neglectful Hollywood royalty in the cocaine-addled 1980s. I loved it, man. It feels like an important book, and that Ellis was only 19 when he wrote it makes it at once more impressive (because the writing is so confident) and more authentically disturbing (because no matter how much Ellis protests that his shit isn't autobiographical, let's look at the facts: Ellis wrote this book as a teenager from L.A going to college on the east coast; the book is about a teenager from L.A. home from college on the east coast; and even if nothing that happens in the book specifically happened to him in real life, he was clearly doing what teachers tell you to do—he was writing what he knew. And what he knew wasn't pretty). So yeah, five stars; here's a few reasons why I'm all about this shit:

It's viscerally effective. The vignette structure and clipped prose style propel the book along in a speedy, disorienting haze that mirrors protagonist Clay's fucked mental state. It moves, and if you wanted to just read this book in one quick burst of a sitting without really thinking about it at all you would probably still have a worthwhile experience. Like I said, visceral.

It's majorly evocative of time and place. I'm sure you've heard that thing James Joyce said about how if Dublin burned down it could be rebuilt based on Ulysses. Well, if the dream architects from Inception wanted to recreate 1980s Los Angeles they would need a copy of Less Than Zero to use as a reference guide. I haven't felt so immersed in the '80s since I watched Earth Girls Are Easy, or so L.A.-ified since I read Chandler. So many references to Tab, Betamax, MTV and (of course) cocaine—and that's just what's on the surface.

It's deceptively complex. There are interesting questions of form here. The novel is in the first person, but Clay's narration subverts our expectations about first-person narration, in that his flashes of introspection are few and far between; we know very little of his inner life (and we learn jackshit about other characters' inner lives). Instead, Clay's narration provides a just-the-facts-ma'am account of events that in a healthy person would provoke some kind of emotional reaction. On top of that is a fascinatingly discordant effect: we can tell that Clay is desperately miserable because it's reflected in the actions he relates, but he doesn't give us access to the thoughts and emotions by which we would typically understand his misery. By leaving this question mark, Ellis heroically refuses to supply facile answers about What's Wrong With The Kids These Days, letting us draw our own conclusions. Perhaps only a writer as young as Ellis was at the time could have been smart enough to do it this way. If he'd tried to fill in the blanks, to offer even the most poetic of explanations, the book would've been sunk by smarmy self-importance.

Underlying the horror is both a strain of dark humor and a stream of unexpectedly lovely grace notes. This is an effect I associate specifically with the films of Harmony Korine—finding beauty in even the ugliest human environments. (Korine would be a great choice to adapt Ellis for the screen, though I doubt Harm would be interested in fucking with other people's work. The masked, murderous redneck freaks of Trash Humpers aren't so very different from Ellis' fucked-up Angeleno nihilists.) In Less Than Zero some of those grace notes can be found in the italicized interstitials recalling Clay's antediluvian trip to visit his grandparents; some are found in Ellis' physical descriptions of the L.A. landscape; and some pop up amidst the soulless anti-hedonism that makes up the bulk of the novel's action. As for humor, you have to squint a little bit to see it, but check out those scenes of Clay talking to his awful therapist, who just wants Clay to help him with his screenplay. Or the back-and-forth, gossipy inanities that some characters sling at each other about who slept with who, or the frequent refrain stating or asking if somebody O.D.'d. Hell, most of the book is funny if you look at it from a certain angle. And from a different angle it's a despairing tragedy.

In the years since this novel was published I think the moneyed youth of America has gotten even more horrible, or at least equally horrible in different ways. Gary Shteyngart sort of tried to write about this in Super Sad True Love Story, but he failed. My generation needs its Bret Easton Ellis. And I need to read the rest of this guy's stuff....more

Probably not Egan's fault that I didn't love this one -- I'm starting to think it's impossible for me to get behind any novel with this kind of pointiProbably not Egan's fault that I didn't love this one -- I'm starting to think it's impossible for me to get behind any novel with this kind of pointillist structure. Maybe I'm more aesthetically conservative than I thought I was, because this year I've read two ecstatically praised novels that use this piecemeal approach (the other being David Mitchell's Ghostwritten) and found it difficult to give a fuck about either of 'em. The idea, I guess, is that the individual fragments add up to a greater thematic or narrative gestalt that can be observed by standing further away. But this distance seems to me antithetical to the purpose of the novel, which is supposed to be all about close engagement with a set of imagined lives and/or events. Not that I want to be prescriptive about this sort of thing, or even use phrases like "the purpose of the novel," because what do I know? But it just feels too often like a case of literary ADD. Mike Reynolds says Goon Squad is "definitely a novel," but doth he protest too much? The fact that Mike even feels compelled to make this assertion tells you that it is not "definitely" anything. (Gives me an idea for the paperback: instead of the customary "A Novel" ID underneath the title, Knopf should go with "Definitely A Novel.") This is really a story collection, I think, and I'm vaguely perturbed by the trend of slapping the "novel" label on interrelated story cycles; if they were first published today, would In Our Time or Winesburg, Ohio be pushed as novels? I'm all for the malleability of forms, but I'm also for truth in advertising. So I dunno.

And so, like any story collection, some of the stuff in Goon Squad is better than some of the other stuff -- though Egan's crisp, satisfying prose can be found throughout. Like everyone else, I loved the powerpoint chapter, excerpts from a 12-year-old girl's "slide journal," as moving as it is formally innovative. Also wonderful is the first-person account by a David Foster Wallace-esque journalist of a celebrity interview gone horribly awry. But another piece, co-starring the same celebrity, struck me as so wildly implausible that I kept waiting for it to be revealed as a fiction-within-the-fiction (no such luck); and an Almost Famous-ish section about rockin' '70s teenagers was hideously over-voiced, a fault that also occasionally tripped up Egan's otherwise deeply entertaining The Keep. It's like, I know you want to create a convincing teen-girl voice, but replacing the verb "to say" with the verb "to go" in every single instance of that verb just comes off as a distracting authorial contrivance. And some of the units, like one involving an African safari (which Mike cites as one of his favorites) might have really worked for me in the context of a proper story collection, but in the context of a novel -- with all its attendant expectations, even in non-linear fragment form -- it felt inessential. So labels do matter, I think, and this book has the wrong label. But of course there is plenty of wonderful writing here, many juicy sentences of wit and insight and elegance that jolted me out of my macro-disappointment; I'm still on Team Egan, and I appreciate her continuing efforts to engage meaningfully with the more disconcertingly salient aspects of contemporary culture. Sometimes the strings show a little too much -- the final chapter (which I basically like) strays perilously close to essayism, and doesn't seem to understand how text messaging works -- but I'm down with any writer these days who tries to chronicle The Way We Live Now without being a dick about it.

Update: I'm officially the only person who does not love this book, so I am floating to assert my independence. Shine on, you crazy me....more

I thought I was done with this simulacrum bulls**t. Really, I did. One of the reasons why Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, NY failed to impress me as a mI thought I was done with this simulacrum bulls**t. Really, I did. One of the reasons why Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, NY failed to impress me as a mind-blowing masterpiece was its (to my mind) lazy employment of this most common of postmodernist tropes, this tired hand-me-down from Dick and Ba(udri)llard and The Matrix and eXistenZ and etcetera whatever nevermind. I wished for a moratorium on films and books incorporating the idea that WHAT IF REALITY IS JUST, LIKE, AN ILLUSION, MAN, and all its labyrinthine variants.

I also was pretty sure I could do without a big New York Novel for a while, since I don't live in New York and really, if you don't live in New York why should you give a s**it about those books--the ones that seem to be yelling, "My city's dick is bigger than your city's dick!"

And then lil' Jonny Lethem, the author who consistently wins the award for Literary Hotshot I Would Most Like To Hang Out With, Given Our Similar Tastes, And The Fact That He's So F**king Cool, goes ahead and writes a mammothly bizarre book that is both a New York Novel and, partially and importantly, an entry in what I think we can go ahead and deem officially the Genre of Simulacrum Fiction. (I should note that I am absolutely NOT an expert in this genre. I've simply observed that it exists, and believe that it's maybe a little overused at this point. Although, that's probably stupid, because if it's a genre then it's by definition going to be cockroach-durable, riffed on by generation after generation, and if that's the case then I'll just have to learn to like it, dammit, or else just bask in the comfort that Lethem did it differently, somehow, once, with this very book, which I happen to think is f**cking awesome, hence the five stars above.)

Where was I? Sorry, I think that pesky reality shifted again while I was immersed in parentheses. (Or should I say immersed in ellipses? You'll get that if you've read Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem!) Anyway. No one knows what to make of Chronic City. I sure as hell don't. I mean, I know that it's ambitious, and that its prose is almost painfully gorgeous, and I can identify many of its theeeeemes, which Lethem brandishes like weapons that he's maybe just threatening to use, and it's hard to know if he's actually followed through until you look down and see the blood from where he knifed you, or didn't. But the cool thing--one of the many cool things--about this book is how Lethem seems to deflect, or anticipate, or just render irrelevant the expectations associated with his chosen modes of storytelling. If this is a New York Novel then it's also kind of an ANTI- New York Novel (in the way that McCabe & Mrs. Miller is an anti-Western), or at least a self-aware one. Like, the characters never venture outside Manhattan, and Lethem has them float theories about how they're not sure the world outside Manhattan really exists, or exists as they know it--literalizing the old remark about how New Yorkers think their town is the whole universe and whatnot. And the simulacrum stuff is handled in an almost cavalier fashion--Lethem doesn't seem, like other practitioners of the genre, so damn proud of himself for coming up with such crazy ideas. They just kind of turn out to be important without much fuss. And Lethem never cheats on his characters with his ideas, if that makes sense--he's faithful to Chase and Perkus to the end, and the home stretch of the book is emotionally rewarding in a way I never would have predicted.

But this book isn't just about New York and the simulacra thereof--it's also about what might be Lethem's great theme, the subject he was put on Earth to explore: the nature of our obsessive personal relationships with art and culture. Perkus Tooth may be insane, but here's the thing: you have to identify with him in order to get anything out of this book. This book is for the Perkus Tooths of the world, and yes, goddammit, I'm one of them--hopefully a little more well-adjusted, not so much into the conspiracy theories, but absolutely approaching my life as a curator of cultural objects. We Perkus Tooths use culture as our primary means of understanding both our lives and the world surrounding us. It's not always something to be proud of, but it's a condition that Lethem gives beautiful voice to--especially in his 2005 essay collection The Disappointment Artist, a must-read for all you Perkus Tooths out there. In Chronic City, this cultural obsession gives way to madness, but the twist is that the madness turns out to have been not so mad after all--in fact, less mad than reality, or "reality," which brings me back to where I started. Perkus's vindication is a vindication for all of us who have trained ourselves to study the aspect ratios of films, who spot the germs of influence in our favorite neglected bands, who mentally repeat favorite sentences from novels while in line at the bank, and who mediate these obsessions on the greatest simulacrum of them all: the Internet.

I haven't yet read enough Lethem to declare this his "masterpiece" or whatever (strange how people have taken to associate that term with singularity, as if an artist is only allotted one masterpiece per lifetime), and on a conventional narrative level it is maybe less satisfying than (the first two thirds of) The Fortress of Solitude. But Lethem is working in a different register here, so comparisons to that novel are unfair (cough, Kakutani), and what he's doing strikes me as unique and hilarious and totally brilliant, a cultural object worthy of Perkus himself, ready to be studied by adoring cults for clues to the secrets of our selves and our realities.

So where did Swamplandia! go wrong? Was it the point at which the narrative branches off into two tracks, following the separate adventures of the proSo where did Swamplandia! go wrong? Was it the point at which the narrative branches off into two tracks, following the separate adventures of the protagonist's wayward brother? Was it the inclusion of a play-within-the-play, suddenly covering the life story of a new character? Was it the general shift in tone from quirkily heartfelt family novel to weak magical-realism about ghosts? Or did the real trouble begin at conception, when promising young fictionist Karen Russell had the idea to expand one of her rightly celebrated short stories into a novel?

Sadly, I'm jumping on board the disappointed bandwagon of folks who found Russell's debut novel a non-starter. Or actually no, the start is pretty good, so let's say a non-middler and a non-finisher. Why so many kind notices in the literary world? Because everyone likes Karen Russell and wants to give her a hand, even though she wrote a book that's not actually very good? I can tell that Karen Russell is a sweetheart. She'd make a great girlfriend, I bet. I wouldn't mind passing an evening or two in her company, cuddling on a couch, going over her ideas for new stories. But my critiques would be merciless in those cuddle-workshop sessions, because sweet young Karen just isn't there yet. There was certainly potential to this saga of an alligator-wrestling family's downfall, but after nicely establishing the characters and their situation, Russell doesn't seem to know where to go. Neither of the forked narrative's tines are of much interest, and the prose, though marked with the occasional neat simile or clever construction, never hooks onto a clear voice. The resolution is hurried; the preceding events turn out to not really have mattered; it's as if Russell knew she was in a tailspin and decided to just cut her losses, get out, and try again another day. I will give her another shot on that day. And if you're reading this, KR, I am totally serious about those cuddle sessions....more

Would you think me a nutjob if I told you that FranzeUh-oh. I didn't like it. Review coming up faster than you can say "jismic grunting butt-oink"...

Would you think me a nutjob if I told you that Franzen's Freedom reads less like a novel than like an extremely articulate gossip column?

Hear me out.

I admit that it can be difficult for me to appreciate the kind of undiluted realism that Franzen favors, because so much of what I value in art is tied into one form of defamiliarization or another. Simply putting a mirror up to the world can be interesting, even enlightening, but it rarely stirs my blood or makes me feel anything beyond purely intellectual admiration. It's also true that I have no love for the drama of suburban disaffection and infidelity. That I still kind of admired the book despite this heavily stacked deck is a testament to Franzen's writerly professionalism. When I say professionalism rather than something like brilliance I don't mean to damn him with faint praise -- well, I do, but the praise is sincere despite its faintness. Based solely on Freedom -- I never finished The Corrections, to my embarrassment -- I think Franzen is more a skilled (but overreaching) craftsman than the epochal artist he's being sold as, if you'll forgive a tired dichotomy. See, just about everyone, hagiographer and agnostic alike, has noted that the book is thoroughly readable and absorbing. Franzen's craftsmanship lies in his mastery of the fundamentals -- how to structure a story, introduce a character, craft prose that speeds along with momentum, etc -- that lead to prime readability. But why is it that, each time I put the book down after being reasonably absorbed, I felt a bad taste in my mouth?

Despite his vaunted observational acumen -- which, to be honest, I found kind of blinkered and basic -- Franzen's treatment of his characters is too often tainted by he-said she-said superficiality. This book reads like your smartest friend talking smack about your other friends. Or, perhaps, given Franzen's fixation on familial resentment, a better metaphor might be your cranky uncle kvetching eloquently about your bratty cousins. Which might sound like a bit of bitchy fun, but remember we're talking about 500+ pages here, and that shit gets old. Yes, Franzen relishes wading into the muck of his characters' twisted and morally corrupt psyches, but what he finds there seems less like authentically messy human complexity than a prefabricated, prescriptive mechanism of misbehavior.

I didn't even realize what the missing ingredient was until Franzen made a belated stab at inserting it. What's missing is compassion. Without authorial compassion for his troubled characters, those characters' development gets arrested at a half-baked, shallow level, no matter how frantically Franzen limns their consciousnesses. Franzen keeps digging and digging, but he never gets past the surface, because he's using the wrong shovel. When he finally tries a little tenderness at the end, it's like the deathbed conversion of a lifelong atheist: sincere, but untrustworthy.

Where the New York Times sees a genius who uses his "profound moral intelligence" to "illuminate the world we thought we knew," I see a good writer who has crafted a cynical soap opera against a ripped-from-the-headlines Bush-era backdrop (ensuring baseless "Great American Novel" hosannas from the press). Melodrama would, I suppose, be a kinder term than soap opera or gossip column, but that genre designation carries certain associations -- blatant artificiality, crying-on-the-outside catharsis, stylistic opulence -- that don't apply here. And yet the book does, at times, feel like little more than a bad melodrama, a dour monotony representing neither the real world of emotions nor a freshly imagined authorial perspective on same.

And you know, if Franzen wanted to explore how Americans abuse their personal and political freedoms, I'm not sure why he chose such a blandly familiar cycle of jerks-hurting-jerks to express this potentially interesting theme. Mistakes are made; resentment simmers; betrayal explodes; lather, rinse, repeat, pass on to younger generation. Marriage is hard, depression is insidious, infidelity can be a moral gray area, children shape their lives in reaction to their parents' lives, etc. I don't claim to be the world's closest reader, but I just don't see the profundity in that. Not that profundity is a requirement of good fiction, but apart from the finely crafted prose I'm not sure this book even justifies its existence. Franzen buries his would-be thesis in an aside about somebody's immigrant grandfather: The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage. OK, that has a nice aphoristic ring to it. But who are the personalities susceptible to limitless freedom -- all Americans? If Franzen is saying that all Americans are prone to misanthropy and rage, I have three responses to that: 1) No shit, Sherlock. 2) That's not unique to Americans. 3) What exactly does freedom have to do with misanthropy? What's the causality there? If that's the question you tried to answer with your book, Franzy, I don't think you pulled it off. Frankly, I'm more convinced by that glib David Cross bit about how watching an episode of The Simple Life made him realize that he hated our freedom as much as George W. Bush said the terrorists did.

I don't regret reading this (though I do regret buying the hardcover). I've now done my due diligence with Franzen and can safely ignore him from now on. He goes on the I Don't Get It list, alongside such other beloved-by-people-who-aren't-me artists as Hayao Miyazaki and Joy Division.

But hey, my hometown of Oak Park, Illinois gets name-checked in spectacularly bizarre fashion, so let me reproduce that by way of closing: Walter’s sophisticated Chicago cousin Leif told informative and harrowing stories of the big-city suburbs; most memorable and worry-provoking, for Walter, was the one about an Oak Park eighth-grader who’d managed to get naked with a girl and then, unsure about what was supposed to happen next, had peed all over her legs. Hell yeah, motherfucker. That's how we roll....more

Oh dear. All the cool kids love David Mitchell. I want to be one of the cool kids! But I won't lie to you, cool kids: this book frustrated the hell ouOh dear. All the cool kids love David Mitchell. I want to be one of the cool kids! But I won't lie to you, cool kids: this book frustrated the hell out of me, at times outright pissed me off, despite my respect for Mitchell's dexterity hat-trick (intellectual, narrative, verbal). It's the kind of book that made me scarf down the last 100 pages in a single day, breathlessly turning pages in the hopes of making sense of its head-scratching patchwork, only to put down the tome humming that Peggy Lee tune that's so helpful in moments of disappointment. Is this what it was like to be a fan of TV's Lost, I wonder?

It's really the structure that's the source of my headaches with this book. Individually I liked most of the stories/chapters/whatevers (only the "Holy Mountain" one straight-up bored me), but together they add up to something I'm not buying. And I hated how Mitchell undermined his own perfectly fine stories with confusing little twists and flourishes meant to blow our minds, I guess, like when he actually ends one of the more gripping tales with a sentence like "None of this really happened." Or the other story that ends with its protagonist keeling over in death throes only to offer some mumbo-jumbo about how he's dying "again" or remembers what it feels like to die, or something. Whatever, dude. As for the little dollops of interconnectivity that Mitchell drops in to "link" the stories, I found them either underexplained or just unconvincingly contrived.

The last story (not counting a brief, completely incomprehensible epilogue) is sort of a microcosm of my reaction to the book. I absolutely love the premise of that Manhattan-set chapter: the apocalypse from the perspective of a late-night radio DJ, sending out survivalist missives over the airwaves. (For a more satisfying variation on a similar premise, check out one of my favorite movies of last year, the awesomely brainy horror-comedy Pontypool.) I was carried along by its strangeness, its current of pleasantly defamiliarizing prose, its intriguing narrative surprises. But at some point that all goes over the top and the piece ends in an act of imaginative self-pleasuring, Mitchell's intellectual showboating finally outstripping any and all chance of my what-the-hell-is-going-on curiosities being sated.

I realize, of course, that in some respects I'm just being dim, and that some of Mitchell's project has flown over my head. Fine. I read lots of books that fly over my head; the difference lies in whether or not the author makes me aspire to fill the gap between my head and the book. The ending--and nearly all the individual pieces' endings--of this book made me shrug so insouciantly that I'm just enjoying the summer breeze of that book whooshing through my cranium's airspace.

Still three stars cuz it was consistently interesting and reading it made me feel like one of the cool kids, if only for a short while....more

OK, I was gonna let the inside-joke above stand, but I guess I do fI would write a review, but I have to go return some videotapes.

*******************

OK, I was gonna let the inside-joke above stand, but I guess I do feel like getting some thoughts down about America's Next Top Psycho.

At this point I'm sure it bores everyone to dredge up the whole misogyny question again, but it still puzzles me that smart people who must certainly know not to confuse the character's perspective with the author's continue to pull the concern-troll card here. Like, it's perfectly valid if you think the satire in the book fails, or even if you think the violence is overwrought, but anyone who thinks this book is misogynistic must also believe that Mark Twain was racist for using the word "nigger" repeatedly in Huck Finn. You can't and won't convince me that there's any meaningful difference.

Of course, what's unfortunate about the "does this book hate women" discourse is that it blocks discussion of the hundreds of pages of this book that do not contain violence towards women or men. One thing that surprised me (going in, as I did, with various preconceptions) was that Patrick Bateman is not really the cartoon character that Christian Bale portrayed in the movie. I mean, my memory of the film is dim, and I know that Bale was great in it, but on the page Bateman is a lot scarier because he's self-aware. You can't just dismiss him as an easily mockable artificial construct or a satirical avatar of Ellis's anti-yuppie vitriol, because you're living inside his head for 400 pages, and it's clear that he knows exactly what he is -- and, more disturbingly, he seems to be the only character in the book for whom this is true. I think that's the elephant in the room that people who talk about American Psycho either don't understand or don't wanna face: Bateman, as monstrous as he is, is actually the hero of this story. He's the only one who speaks directly and listens to people, while everyone else is off in their own solipsistic haze; he's the only one who seems to have any interests beyond the rank materialism of snazzy clothes and trendy restaurants, it's just that those interests involve sadistic torture and murder; he's the only one with any apparent concerns about the world and his place in it. Given the utter voidlike vapidity of every single person in this novel, it's not unreasonable to say that Bateman is the only one with a soul. That is the truly frightening thing about this book, moreso than any of the torture-porn scenes.

Personally, I prefer the tragic simplicity of Ellis's Less Than Zero. Psycho can be repetitive and, I think, inconsistent -- is the eloquent, charming Bateman of the first chapter's dinner party really the same guy as the Bateman who can't complete any basic social interaction without begging off to go return some videotapes? Maybe it's just his descent into total madness, but something about the evolution of the character felt improvisatory on Ellis's part. The other thing that's mostly missing here, which is why I think it's ultimately inferior to Less Than Zero, is the subtly calibrated pathos that made the earlier novel such a knockout. Without resorting to speeches or explanations, Ellis expressed in Less Than Zero a deep sadness that belied the narrator's affectless tone. In American Psycho, there was really only one moment that felt like the kind of grace note I loved in the earlier book, and I'll paste it here: We had to leave the Hamptons because I would find myself standing over our bed in the hours before dawn, with an ice pick gripped in my fist, waiting for Evelyn to open her eyes. That's the most beautiful sentence in either book, maybe the only truly beautiful sentence Ellis has ever written -- his strengths as a writer do not really include handsome prose. It's such a chilling image -- not a visceral horror like the infamous rat scene, but something that hits you right in the soul, something that, again, makes it impossible to domesticate Bateman by laughing at him. I wish there was more like it.

But in the absence of that, there is plenty to laugh at; I loved the book's comic centerpiece, an all-night conference call between Bateman and a few of his buddies as they spend hours trying to figure out where to eat dinner. It's the kind of marathon absurdism I love, like Mr. Show's Story of Everest bit, where you can't believe how long the joke is being dragged out, and eventually the dragging-out becomes the joke, to the point that you get irritated, but then the joke laps your irritation and you find it hilarious again. Bateman's lone encounter with law enforcement (actually a P.I.) is played for laughs instead of suspense (a smart move given Ellis's total lack of interest in any kind of narrative momentum), in one of the weirdest and funniest of the dialogue scenes. And it never stops being funny when Bateman will straight-up admit, in plain English, that he is a mass murderer, and his conversation partner will not register his confession at all -- because Ellis's most abundantly clear point is that people in this culture did not (do not?) listen to each other, at all, even a little bit.

So nah, I don't think this is a Great American Novel, or the Great Gatsby of the late 20th century (as one Goodreads reviewer floated), although I do think that's what Ellis was going for, in his own sick way. But twenty years later it's still stirring up debate, and if that's not a mark of good litterachurr I dunno what is....more

The gnomic sentence above could have served as the epigraph to Roth's masterpiece American PastThere's nobody less salvageable than a ruined good boy.

The gnomic sentence above could have served as the epigraph to Roth's masterpiece American Pastoral, a novel to which this absolutely gorgeous and deeply troubling novelette is, I believe, a terrific B-side. Like Swede Levov in Pastoral, protagonist Bucky Cantor is an upstanding citizen of his mid-20th-century Jewish New Jersey community, athletically gifted and respected by all; and like Swede, Bucky finds himself thrown into the kind of personal crisis in which everything he thought he knew -- about himself, about the world, about God -- is violently cast into doubt, a crisis that leads to his undoing. For Swede, the catalyst for such a crisis was an act of terrorism perpetrated by his daughter; for Bucky it's a polio epidemic afflicting the children of Newark in the summer of 1944. In both books, Roth gazes unflinchingly at the effects of inexplicable horror's intrusion into the life of a decent, successful man. But where Pastoral was a devastating sprawl, fussily obsessed with the internal minutiae of a soul in freefall, Nemesis is concentrated and broad, with a big ol' narrative ellipsis between main story and epilogue. That's why I called it a B-side. But the B-side is its own art, and I couldn't ask for a better one than this.

The nemesis of the title is God, as Bucky rails against the injustices of fate like the shipwrecked sailors in Stephen Crane's Naturalist classic "The Open Boat", but it's also Bucky himself; the cruel punchline of his tragedy, which makes it almost sadder than Swede Levov's tragedy, is that in ascribing permanent blame to himself for crimes of which no jury in the world would convict him, he actually becomes the agent of his own downfall, fulfills his own irrational prophecy. The ellipsis, which seems to be bothering some readers here, amplifies the effect of this ironic revelation about Bucky; to fill in the details of his life as they occurred rather than in a retrospective postscript would have been to bloat the book unnecessarily. The writing throughout this book is as sharp as any previous Roth I've read, but it's especially beautiful in the game-changing epilogue and lyrical flashback-coda, an inspired passage that could only have come from someone who's still one of our best writers. Make no mistake: as tempting as it is to make fun of him for his continuing solemn fixation on the verities of aging and mortality (and the ridiculous sex of The Humbling, which I gave three stars but which now seems like execrable self-parody), Roth can still write circles around your favorite novelist -- and Nemesis is so good that Roth himself should still be someone's favorite novelist. You earned these five stars, you depressive old geezer!...more

Dig the economy: scale back the unsustainable sprawl of L.A. Confidential—streamline it. The catch: still cram aFeature this is one of Ellroy's best.

Dig the economy: scale back the unsustainable sprawl of L.A. Confidential—streamline it. The catch: still cram a CRAAAZY amount of wild plot into a relatively small frame.

Single protagonist, single POV—a departure. NO redemptive qualities for the protag: Ellroy's most tainted hero. First-person narration—sharp, minimalistic. Fractured consciousness: a dirty cop seen FROM THE INSIDE OUT.

Feature this stands apart from both the earlier L.A. Quartet books and the later political stuff. Feature it's unique in the Ellroy oeuvre. Feature start with Black Dahlia if you're a squarejohn n00b—work your way up.

First thing's, as usual, first: despite what his Goodreads author page indicates, Stephen Wright the novelist is not the same individual as Steven WriFirst thing's, as usual, first: despite what his Goodreads author page indicates, Stephen Wright the novelist is not the same individual as Steven Wright the deadpan stand-up comedian. It would be almost inconceivably awesome if this were the case, but it is not. I have Goodreads librarianship so I guess technically I could fix this error, but I am a busy man*, and do not have time for such menial tasks. (*I am not a busy man.)

So. By way of forestalling my review of this great book, and to avoid making plain the fact that I don't really know what to say about it, I will begin by reviewing its blurbs. Yes, critics and authors of 1994 were evidently so blindsided by the twisted richness of Stephen Wright's hyper-stylized prose that they felt compelled to respond in kind, with some hilariously colorful attempts at describing the novel's disturbing, media-crazed perspective on life in the Gen-X fast lane. Let's look at a handful of these blurbs along with my evaluations of them.

First, novelist Robert Coover goes straight-up bonkers: A sensational prime-time novel...Imagine a pornographic twilight zone of beebee-eyed serial killers, drug-stunned pants-dropping road warriors and "marauding armies of mental vampires," a nightmarish country of unparalleled savagery, where there is no longer any membrane between screen and life and the monster image feed is inexhaustible and the good guys are the scariest ones of all. Whoa! Sounds fucking awesome, but then you read the book and realize there are two problems: (1) Coover rips off several phrases directly from Wright (not just the quoted one about vampires, but also "monster image feed" and the kicker about the good guys being the scariest ones of all) and (2) Coover is kind of overstating the violence and horror of the book (a recurring theme of these blurbs): there's one serial-killer who appears in only one chapter, the marauding-vampire bit is only a metaphor, and there are in fact a number of "good guys" who remain more or less good (though many of them are women). But hey, bonus points for how excited the guy got about this book. You can tell he was popping a huge literary boner.

Now let's visit your friend and mine Don DeLillo, who offers a more concise fragment: Strange, dark and funny, a slasher classic. The phrase "a slasher classic" is gorgeously sonorous, and the fact that it's coming from DeLillo makes this a very satisfying blurb. But it's also pretty deceptive -- the book really isn't a slasher anything. I mean, there's a fair share of crime, and one of the book's eight chapters concerns a serial killer, and most of the characters are operating under the influence of violent-media saturation, but c'mon, we're not talking about blood-soaked grindhouse gore, we're talking about a very brainy, multitudinous postmodern novel. Maybe I'm being stupidly literal here but I think the blurbist carries a certain responsibility and if you're going to induce people to read a book by saying words about that book then the words should probably make sense on a literal level. Still love you, Don!

The Village Voice chimes in: [Wright] broadcasts an English as electrically intoxicating as a mescaline slurpee...Wright doesn't supply easy answers, just dark and rapturous neon reflections of the society of spectacle in this hilariously mordant and discombobulating book. Mescaline Slurpee! If someone didn't name their band after this blurb they fucked up big time. Do you see what I mean about critics trying to match Wright's gonzo flavor with a little gonzo of their own? This one is pretty silly, really, "society of spectacle" and all that.

But this one's even sillier, from Spin magazine: A phantasmagoria of roadside attractions: drugs, truckers, flophouses, movie stars, amateur porn—the miasma that rises from a red, white, and blue-balled pop culture. This is just a list of items that appear in the novel followed by a faux-clever dirty joke, "red white and blue-balled," that means absolutely nothing in the context of the book. Dumb.

But look, what's that, it's Toni Morrison here to offer a sprinkling of praise that resists the hyperbolic urge: An astonishing novel. Hmm, a tease. You couldn't be a little more specific, Ms. Morrison? On the generic side, yes, but astonishment from Toni Morrison means more than astonishment from most people, so I'm coming down pro on this one.

It's no surprise that cyberpunk progenitor William Gibson dug this book: Sure-footed, loose-limbed, lyrical, perverse, and deeply, alarmingly funny, Going Native is just about as dead-on crazy as the American novel so desperately needs to be if the form intends to survive the century. Stephen Wright is a major talent. This is a strong blurb in that it avoids specific description while painting an accurate picture of the book's tone. Nice job, Mr. G.

I'll just do one more, from the San Francisco Chronicle, though I could keep going all day, there are so many of these: Daring...a disturbing look into the nether world of American culture....Many of Wright's sentences haunt the reader's mind and demand contemplation....The work of an accomplished writer who may soon be regarded among the top echelon of contemporary American novelists. This one's retrospectively poignant because Wright never really did become regarded among the top echelon of contemporary American novelists, at least not by major cultural gatekeepers. (In-the-know folks like Mike Reynolds know better, of course.) As for the "nether world of American culture" stuff, I mean, yeah, kind of, but there's gotta be a less annoying way to talk about that aspect of the book. I'll let you know if I think of one.

***

The impression given by this massive hype machine is that Going Native is something like a non-retarded version of Oliver Stone's dumber-than-rocks "satire" Natural Born Killers. And in a sense -- a narrow sense, maybe -- that's sort of what it is: scenes of American fringe-dwellers and their frightening behaviors and milieus, filtered through the ubiquity of mass-media violence, very loosely taking the form of a road trip. But there's plenty of content here that strays from the blurbs' promise of lurid, psychotic wackiness. In fact, those looking for a pure dose of lurid, psychotic wackiness will probably find this novel entirely too austere and cerebral. Wright is just as attuned to subtle, internal human intricacies as any self-respecting literary novelist, but he's not afraid to color outside the lines, on an outsized canvas, in blood. (Oh fuck, now I sound like one of those 1994 critics. A crazy ride into the diseased heart of modern American excess! A gunshot to the face of America's sleaziest fantasies! An orgasmic fistfight in the back alley of the American nightmare!)

The book's structure would probably land it on Joel's "stories-no-wait-a-novel-no-wait" shelf, an approach that I have complained about on this website before. But while I dissed the novel-in-stories format in my reviews of David Mitchell's Ghostwritten and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, I had no problem with its deployment here. Is this just a case of Whitmanesque self-contradiction (I do contain multitudes, thank you very much), or is Wright doing something different that won me over? Hmm. There is one character who pops up in each chapter, linking them all on a literal level; it's possible to view this book as a road novel told from every perspective except the protagonist's. Furthermore, the chapters are linked by style. As disparate as their characters and situations are, each chapter bears the auteurist stamp of Wright's singular voice. And while you never know quite what you're gonna get when you start a new chapter -- I don't want to get into plot specifics with this book, because part of the fun is the surprise factor of its self-replenishing conceits -- you do figure out at a certain point what kinds of stories you're being told, and the book proceeds as smoothly as a novel. There's surprisingly little of the between-chapters whiplash typical of story collections or story cycles; it really does feel like one unified work, without any overly contrived "connections," even though it lacks a continuous narrative. So I guess I no longer believe this format is inherently suck, but unless you're as great as Stephen Wright, you still probably shouldn't try it.

Wright's prose is stunning. This is the rare novel that's both highly demanding and absolutely pleasurable. Good luck spending less than four or five minutes per page; good luck trying not to immediately re-read certain passages, either because comprehension proved impossible on a first pass or simply to prolong the charged glow of a master's verbal manipulations. To anyone with even a basic appreciation for literary style -- particularly of the variety associated with postmodernism or maximalism -- Stephen Wright needs to be on your radar, yesterday. Though DeLillo is the most obvious point of comparison, Wright is more of an extremist; he often goes farther than his predecessor, embellishing ideas and pushing forward through narrative space where DeLillo would be content to offer up an elusive wisp of rhythmic aphorism. It's indescribably thrilling to be in the presence of such stylistic swagger.

After such effusion I feel obliged to provide an example. Tough to choose. Here's a full paragraph that gives you a sense of how knotty Wright's language is; most of this passage is an epic run-on sentence, followed by a startling button of relative brevity. Warm up your parsing muscles, this is a complex motherfucker:

The birth was an event of unspeakable proportions, a wild ride among significances memory couldn't recapture without damage: the cosmos was knotted in ligatures of pain; unravel the threads, liberate the stars whose blossoms promise ease from the agony of time; astounding the revelatory force of torment that carried her, teensy squeaking her, up and up, through ceiling and roof, out into space, out of space, to the cold chamber of the dark queen with the patchwork face of old nightmares who leaned from her throne to tell Jessie something she did not want to hear, and as the thin blue lips began to move, Jessie shrank back in horror, spinning down onto a point so dense the soul's implosion was averted only by a nova cry of life surfacing, and she opened her wondering eyes upon the holy puckered countenance of a new daughter, in whose glow the visions of her mad journey toward this sight began evaporating as cleanly as morning dew. Life is death's amnesia, she thought, and forgetfulness a grace to which we cling.

That's not necessarily representative -- it's probably the longest sentence in the book, and by necessity it's a bit ungainly -- but it shows you how far and how deep Wright's use of language goes to illustrate his themes. If I'm reading this section correctly, Wright is proposing that childbirth is a disease of horrifying memory-retrieval, the only cure for which is...childbirth. We create life to distract ourselves from the oppression of our own pasts and trajectories. See, those "mescaline slurpee" blurbs didn't exactly hint at this level of discourse, did they?

The book's reputation suggests that it's about conditions of strangeness. But Going Native is just as much about filtering everyday mundanity through the cracked lens of extreme, hyper-intellectualized consciousness -- the same lens that Wright uses also, yes, for stories about pornographers, junkies and knife-wielding hitchhikers. In this way, something as simple and familiar as a dinner party, a bookstore browse, or a lover's spat becomes an occasion for profound crises of the self and takes on the same frightening, massive-scaled dimensions as does an act of shocking violence. For Wright, there is no longer any meaningful difference between these theoretically disparate conditions. Wright's vision of life in the postmodern era is defined not by a ubiquity of larger-than-life incidents, but by the feverish application of a larger-than-life perspective to life-sized events. If everything is a mescaline slurpee, then nothing is.

***

I cannot comprehend why Wright remains so obscure, relatively speaking. Going Native has only 150 ratings on Goodreads. Even a second-rate DeLillo novel like Mao II has 2,300 ratings -- 15x as many as Wright's masterpiece. I'm not saying this guy should have achieved mainstream fame, but he deserves to be as well-known as other novelists in the postmodern canon. Maybe part of the problem is generational; born in 1946, Wright's too young to be part of the first wave of pomo torch-bearers (Pynchon, DeLillo, Barth/Barthelme, etc), but he's too old to hang with the Gen-X crew (DFW, Lethem, Whitehead, etc) -- two generations of postmodernists all of whom have gained wider and more enduring recognition than Wright has. Or maybe the answer has something to do with his sparsity of output. There are only four books to his name; I cannot wait to be challenged, creeped out, excited, flummoxed, turned on and word-intoxicated by the other three. And to re-read this one; though I basically never re-read books (already way more new-to-me stuff than one lifetime can accommodate), I'd be disappointed in myself if I never re-read this, both to gain a fuller picture of how its individual pieces fit together and to re-engage on a micro level with Wright's gloriously complex sentencework. Follow my lead, will you?

It is a curious enigma that so great a mind would question the most obvious realities and object even to things scEpigraph as authorial hand-tipping:

It is a curious enigma that so great a mind would question the most obvious realities and object even to things scientifically demonstrated... while believing absolutely in his own fantastic explanations of the same phenomena.

Were it not for this epigraph, which comes from Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, the reader might, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, believe that Adam Levin tacitly approves of the violent actions of his ten-year-old scholar/terrorist/possible-messiah Gurion. It's not a spoiler to say that there are violent actions or that he is a terrorist, because this information is pretty much revealed before the book even starts, in a message from the "publisher" as part of the book's framing device. We read the first 800+ pages knowing that some shit is gonna go down, we read the last 200 pages of nonstop shit-going-down, and then the book is over, and we are left to ponder the moral implications on our own, because Levin and Gurion have cut and run, so to speak; instead of allowing the reader to continue living in this world after the shit has gone down, to observe the shit's effects on the book's many characters and to carry their moral questioning to the point it has seemingly been building toward, Levin and Gurion porkypig the reader: That's all, folks.

You can't read a book this long without the book becoming part of you. It's doubtful I will ever think of the word "damage" or "arrangement" the same way again. Despite the exaggerated reality of a world in which a ten-year-old can write a thousand-page scripture and lead actual armies in violent revolt, the characters are pretty vivid and knowable (with at least one problematic exception) and it's not hard to form attachments. So the attachment I formed to Levin's world partly accounts for my disappointment with the ending. I really hate to sound like one of those rubes who complained about The Sopranos ending being too ambiguous, or one of those dim fanboys who couldn't handle the ending of Lost failing to answer all their burning questions. I can handle ambiguity, really I can. But when Levin ends it where he does, he effectively cuts the book off from its themes, so that the book just isn't enough about what it's supposed to be about. Or at least, that is my near-immediate reaction upon finishing; I reserve the right to decide that I'm wrong.

From where I sit, the book is principally about two things: (1) the rabbit-hole of (over)analytical thinking about both oneself and the world in terms of morality, faith, and practicality -- what Douglas Wolk's Bookforum review describes as being "talmudically obsessed with worrying out every possible interpretation of everything" -- and (2) violence, violence, violence -- the mechanics, the ethics, the causes, the justifications, the consequences, and so on. For whatever reason (mainly an aesthetic one, I suspect), Levin avoids the word violence like the plague and replaces it with the word damage. Damage takes many forms, and nearly every scene in the book is somehow related to some form of damage. (One of my favorite digressions in the book is a brilliant monologue by one of the school security guards that's basically a long, impassioned moral defense of bullying and bullies.) When the book ends where it does, Levin forces us to reconsider these themes in light of the shit that has gone down, without actually further developing them himself. What does Gurion, with all his endless analytical hand-wringing over fucking everything, have to say about the events that came to define his life? We don't know, except in little hints. Maybe this is totally fine and I'm having a naive, unsophisticated reaction. Maybe I'm just pissed at the disappearance of Bam Slokum from the narrative, a fascinating character who was built up as the villain of the piece and given a handful of stunning monologues before Levin discarded him and left his purpose in the novel unresolved. The book is over a thousand pages long, but it seems unfinished.

I had other problems, too. The aforementioned obsession with interpretive analysis is a pleasure to read for a while, but after several hundred pages it becomes extremely tiresome. The love interest, June, is a vaguely defined character, and I never found her relationship with Gurion convincing. I've mentioned before that I have trouble following action sequences in prose fiction, and this book's big violent set piece just made my eyes glaze over -- though that's maybe more my fault than Levin's. (Also, from the department of petty, meaningless complaints: some of the Chicago geography is questionable, even though Levin lives here.)

But this review has been mostly griping, and you can see I've given it four stars, so...yeah, The Instructions is not optional. It's as ambitious as it is huge, written in as inventive and precisely calibrated a first-person voice as I've ever read, often very funny, full of individual scenes of holyshit perfection, weighty without getting weighed down, and almost maddeningly thought-provoking. My disappointments with it are purely a result of its successes, if that makes sense. I look forward to seeing what Levin can do on a less massive scale, and I seriously regret missing his appearance at my local library (also Joel's local library) back in October. Still, I know where he teaches, so I suppose I could always go downtown and stalk him. I just hope he doesn't try to damage me....more

[Upgrading from 3 to 4 stars because for some reason I keep thinking about this book even though I read it like a year ago, and because I fucking love[Upgrading from 3 to 4 stars because for some reason I keep thinking about this book even though I read it like a year ago, and because I fucking love the audacity of the opening sentence.]

What an odd book.

The first section really is magnificent, instantly hooking you with descriptions of the bizarre illness alluded to in the title as well as vivid sketches of the sufferer's life at home and at work. (Some early office-set scenes actually do offer an interesting echo with Ferris' Then We Came to the End, containing the book's sole nods toward humor, although Ferris loses interest in the work thread pretty quickly--a symptom of his surprising lack of focus in this novel.) All the pieces are in place for Ferris to pull off a wrenching tragedy. As is my wont, I was imagining the cinematic possibilities: a man wakes up in an unfamiliar place, alone and disoriented; he shakes the sleep from his body and waits for his mind to follow suit, takes out his phone, and then we cut to the car ride home with his wife, all tense silences and lens flares. Later, an unbroken shot of the man walking, walking, over bridges and along sides of highways, walking and then stopping and then cut; back to the wake-call-ride ritual. The blinking editing rhythms plunging us into his vicious cycle of involuntary escape and shameful return. If nothing else, this first section could make a fine piece of elliptical filmmaking. And of course it works on its own as a study of a family under catastrophic duress, the wife and daughter just as compelling as the man.

And then, shit gets weird. In what I can only assume is a show of solidarity with his perambulatory protagonist, Ferris ditches the sharp sense of purpose he had in the first section and starts wandering aimlessly in the narrative hinterlands. Wife and daughter recede into the background; plot elements introduced earlier fail to pay off even cursorily; different thematic/philosophical hats are tried on, none purchased. Voice and tone become crushingly inconsistent. It's established that the characters don't know what causes the man's condition, but does Ferris know? Did he have any sort of endgame or overarching design in mind? It feels like he was just winging it. But line-by-line the book remains fascinating, and although the shift in conflict from external to internal cuts off too much of the reader's air supply, it's an understandable choice and a gutsy one. One thing Ferris doesn't lack is balls.

The Unnamed is a long way from the fully realized masterpiece that was Then We Came to the End, but I still recommend it, and I think it confirms that Ferris is a writer of consequence and substance who could develop into one of our more interesting prestige novelists. Contrary to the Goodreaders disappointed over Ferris' departure from comedy, I applaud him for trying something different, even if it didn't totally work. Again: balls....more

Update: So, yeah, this is a home run. Deserving of every iSorry, haters. Review to come, possibly, as soon as I reclaim my chair--my legitimate chair!

Update: So, yeah, this is a home run. Deserving of every inch of its hype. It's too bad, however, that so much of the buzz focused on comparisons to The Office and Office Space (nothing against those fine entertainments) and the workplace-drone genre of humor. Because this book kind of is part of that on a surface level, but it's so much more--so much more expansive, humane, ambitious, detailed and moving. It hits my sweet spot of funny-sad. I love the funny-sad but I see it done badly so often, so often the funny's not that funny and the sad is too mawkish. But Ferris nails the perfect balance, much like George Saunders and Wes Anderson and They Might Be Giants (all established masters of funny-sad), except that Ferris nailed it right out of the gate. Hard to believe this is his first novel, harder still to believe he'll ever top it.

As a workplace comedy it's terrific, deftly mixing Mike Judge-y observations with gentle forays into absurdism (in one memorable rant, a character keeps referring to bookshelves as "buckshelves"--it doesn't sound funny out of context, but trust me). And the royal-we narration is not gimmicky or distracting. The novel works basically like third-person omniscient except that the "we" flourishes allow Ferris to portray his fractured community as a hive-mind entity. (And the narration has a hell of a payoff in the book's final sentence.) But it becomes more than a workplace comedy--it becomes, if you will, a moral comedy, not just about it what it means to be a white-collar worker but about it what it means to be fucking human.

Early on in the book, the narrator(s) mention that when you start a new job you can't distinguish all your co-workers at first--it's a haze of faces and names until they gradually start coming together and a clearer picture of the community forms. Well whaddayaknow, that's exactly how the Ferris's characterization works in the novel. There are so many characters at first that they are a blur, we can't differentiate or keep track of them, until Ferris goes in for close-ups and we start to figure everybody out. Joe Pope is maybe the best example of this, the mid-level guy who's above the cubicle drones but below the partners. He exists apart from the community, viewed as an inscrutable cipher and possibly an elitist by the group, and thus by us--until an incredible two-hander scene that introduces a kind of moral suspense as to whether or not Joe will do a certain thing. Or there's the dazzling set piece in the middle of the book in which Ferris departs from the royal-we to do a traditional third-person chapter on the boss, Lynn Mason, and how she spends her last night before taking an important step. Finding the humanity within the hive-mind--for both the author and the characters--is a big part of this book's project.

You don't need to have logged time in the white-collar salt mines for this book to work on you, because it's really about communities and group dynamics, how they elevate us and fail us as individuals. Hell, lemme lay my cards on the table: I'm unemployed, a year out of college with no idea what to do with my life, and yet rather than being foreign to me this book was even more poignant because it reminded me of what I don't have, for better and worse. Sure, I've had summer jobs and temp gigs and internships in office environments, but the kind of really intense community that Ferris writes about isn't something I've ever really experienced, and despite all the undesirable aspects of office life in the book, that made me sad. This isn't an anti-office screed like Office Space. I think it's actually filled with love for the workplace, not for the corporate agendas or nitty-gritty tasks but for the communities (sorry to overuse this word) that it creates and destroys at will. And I will say, without spoiling anything, that it builds up to an ending that is sublimely, beautifully ambiguous--the only other ending in its league is Richard Linklater's Before Sunset ("You're gonna miss that plane"). Great art, folks. Bravo....more

My first Amis. Didn't disappoint! I'm not sure it pulled off its staggering ambitions but it's very easy to enjoy, if you enjoy elaborately witty studMy first Amis. Didn't disappoint! I'm not sure it pulled off its staggering ambitions but it's very easy to enjoy, if you enjoy elaborately witty studies of human perversity and pain.

Character-driven is a term you often hear applied to fiction. It applies here more than usual, and in a different sense. The characters are stock types that Amis has elevated to the realm of literary internality without really changing their status as stock types. They're familiar to anyone familiar with crime stories, or with noir, though London Fields is neither, and only pretends to be the former. Ever see Lang's Scarlet Street? You had Joan Bennett as the femme fatale, working with violent lowlife Dan Duryea to fleece poor schmuck Edward G. Robinson out of some cash. In this novel we have Nicola Six (her name a cognate of the guitarist for Motley Crue -- why?) as the femme, working her inscrutably intricate schemes around the lowlife Keith Talent and the schmuck Guy Clinch -- the fall guy. But it's not about cash (though some of that does change hands), and most of the time it doesn't even seem to be about murder, despite Nicola's introduction as "the murderee." There's also a pomo unreliable narrator in the mix.

Why are these people together in one book? Maybe they each represent a different kind of artist. Samson Young, the narrator, is your fraudulent hack. Incapable of invention himself, he attaches himself to a real-life narrative he stumbles upon and lets the book write itself. On the other hand, he's also ostensibly responsible for all of the book's marvelous prose, so at least the formal aspect of his artistry is very legit. He is the analogue to Dr. Charles Kinbote in Nabokov's Pale Fire, this book's clear antecedent. Kinbote was nuts, but as a writer he was a genius, because he was Nabokov. Nicola Six is the artist so dedicated to her life's work that she is literally willing -- hoping, even -- to die for it. Her art is the orchestration of her own demise; she was once an actress, and now plays her greatest role. Creativity as suicide. Keith Talent -- the book's most vivid, fascinating creation -- is the artist without self-consciousness. The purity of working-class poetry innit. Yeah cheers. But his poetry isn't poetry, it's darts. Keith devotes himself to darts with a fervor and clarity of purpose that not even Nicola can match. Her motivations are muddled and complex, while Keith's are simple and unadulterated to the point of absurdity. You can't spell darts without art. That leaves Guy Clinch, too banal and passive to be an artist himself (though he tries to dabble in fiction, which Sam informs us is crap), but perfectly suited to be the lump of clay cruelly molded by the others. In this book all art depends upon the exploitation or subjugation of someone else, and Guy is at the bottom of that food chain.

Have I made this book sound like a heady chore, or a schematic bore? It's not. It's awesome. It's really fun to read. We circle these characters as they circle each other, first in alternating chapters, then with commingled perspectives as their lives become more entangled. They do things that are sometimes horrifying, sometimes hilarious, sometimes pathetic, sometimes mystifying. At a certain point the criminal plot machinations that brought these people together cease to matter, and it becomes a simpler novel about three variously unhappy persons mucking about in each others' lives; it is the world's most finely wrought episode of Three's Company. Sam the narrator lurks in the background, offering a director's commentary track on each chapter. On the margins there is some vaguely sci-fi business about the end of the millennium (the book came out in 1989) and/or the end of the world. It's not clear what this has to do with the principal plot, other than that eschatology was on Amis' mind as he was writing. And that mindset, in turn, informs his depiction of the characters and their cultural context.

There's more to say, but I'm sapped. This is a long book. Life is represented with both starkly direct harshness and bafflingly circuitous style. During the first half I was in love, but I grew impatient as Amis dragged out his drain-circling. The ending does not quite hit that Mamet bullseye of "both surprising and inevitable" -- it's not really entirely surprising, if you've been theorizing even a little bit -- but it is certainly worthy of thought and discussion. There are the mind-teasing layers one would expect of a novel influenced by Pale Fire. There's a lot of sex talk, though relatively little actual sex. There are some faux-profound statements that may or may not mean anything. There's some brilliant writing, some memorable scenes, and some stuff you'll want to skim. Just don't disrespect the darts. You don't never show no disrespect for the darts....more

At the risk of stating the obvious, let's acknowledge this: what determines the quality of a memoir (not that Out of Sheer Rage can be so narrowly claAt the risk of stating the obvious, let's acknowledge this: what determines the quality of a memoir (not that Out of Sheer Rage can be so narrowly classified, but bear with me) has precisely nothing to do with the kind of life experience the writer has had, and everything to do with what kind of writer the writer is. Ask yourself: does this book exist because some jerk wanted to tell his marketably fascinating life story, or does it exist because a real writer had something interesting to say about himself outside the confines of fiction? The life experiences of, say, George W. Bush are of inherent interest to anyone who lived through his presidency, but I'd sooner fork-stab myself a la Albert Brooks in Drive than read Bush's ghostwritten scribbles. (Pick a less loaded example if you want; there's no shortage of shitty memoirs out there.) Meanwhile, the life experiences of Geoff Dyer are, as he confesses numerous times in this book, of absolutely no interest to anyone. And yet this "memoir" (again, forgive the insufficient terminology) is a hilarious masterpiece. I don't care about anyone's life. I don't want to read anyone's accounting of whatever dramatic or harrowing or epiphanic (or, god forbid, "funny") thing they experienced. Nor am I interested in "travel memoirs" where people talk about the exotic places they go. The only places I go are Dunkin Donuts and the library, so fuck you. And I don't particularly want to read a study of D.H. Lawrence, either. Yet Out of Sheer Rage is a combination of personal memoir, travel memoir and study of D.H. Lawrence. And it's one of the best books I've read in a while and maybe one of the best books I've read ever.

More precisely, this is a memoir about Geoff Dyer's failure to write a study of D.H. Lawrence. And yet even the metatextual implications of that premise can't really prepare you for the unique wonderfulness of these pages. This is a great book about procrastination and neurotic self-sabotage; it is a heroically honest literary explication of one man's astonishingly deep neuroses. Much of the text concerns itself with "irrelevancies," with the arbitrary and mundane and ostensibly dull fixations that precipitated Seinfeld's famous auto-critique: a show "about nothing." Indeed, this book suggests something like what might be produced by Larry David if he were a) British, b) an outstanding prose writer and c) obsessed with D.H. Lawrence. Yes, on top of the irrelevancies -- which, of course, are actually the most relevant relevancies of all -- this book is occasionally, and even interestingly, a book about D.H. Lawrence. But more importantly it is a book about Geoff Dyer as he sees himself in D.H. Lawrence. Through his obsessive immersion in all things Lawrence and his compulsive avoidance of producing any work about Lawrence, Dyer clarifies his own selfhood and relates it back to the reader with wisdom in a manner that caused Steve Martin to very plausibly state that Out of Sheer Rage is the funniest book he's ever read. Beyond that, the book is hard to describe; many reviewers here and elsewhere have categorized it as "uncategorizable" and I have to agree. Just read it. To give you a taste here's a passage that hit so close to home it almost caused me physical pain. Real talk:

I am always on the edge of what I am doing. I do everything badly, sloppily, to get it over with so that I can get on to the next thing that I will do badly and sloppily so that I can then do nothing -- which I do anxiously, distractedly, wondering all the time if there isn't something else I should be getting on with. ... When I'm working, I'm wishing I was doing nothing and when I'm doing nothing I'm wondering if I should be working. I hurry through what I've got to do and then, when I've got nothing to do, I keep glancing at the clock, wishing it was time to go out. Then, when I'm out, I'm wondering how long it will be before I'm back home.

Ja-heen-yuss.

***

Urgent postscript. So I wrote that stuff above feeling great about the book and everything, then I watched the little video embedded on the Goodreads page for this book in which Geoff Dyer briefly discusses a few of his books and drops this bombshell: the premise of Out of Sheer Rage, that it's an account of Dyer's failure to write a book about D.H. Lawrence, was in fact a total fabrication. Dyer never intended to write a straightforward study of Lawrence, always meant for this book to be sprawling and uncategorizable. In other words, the foundation of the book is a lie. The question is, does that matter. I don't have an answer and I still love the book, but this revelation does make Dyer's aim a bit clearer: he set out to illustrate an idea mentioned in the book, that the best kind of literary criticism is not actual "literary criticism" but rather further literature in response to the original literature. Hence Dyer conceiving this multi-headed hydra beast of a book in response to Lawrence. The chutzpah on this guy. It's seriously a great book though so who cares if it's all a lie....more

Attention DFW superfans, do you know about this guy Matthew Sharpe? He seems to be pretty obscure, I only know who he is because some blogger was pimpAttention DFW superfans, do you know about this guy Matthew Sharpe? He seems to be pretty obscure, I only know who he is because some blogger was pimping this book and then I saw it at the library and read it and liked it a lot. Anyway, he reminds me a lot of the dearly departed Mr. Wallace. The circuitous syntax leading to jaw-dropping marathon sentences; the sensitive moral and philosophical engagement with even the most mundane aspects of daily life; the heavyweight intellectual brainpower; the defiant, brainy sense of humor laughing ruefully in the face of human suffering and confusion. These are (some of) the attributes for which DFW has been (perhaps overly) lionized, and I've listed them here because they are all of them present in Matthew Sharpe's You Were Wrong, a terrific new novel that is not getting the buzz it deserves. The main point of divergence with DFW is a matter of scale: Sharpe is no maximalist, and he's able to say uncle after less than 200 pages, evincing a restraint DFW clearly did not possess in his longform fiction. I don't wish to make it sound as though Sharpe's voice is identical to or a ripoff of Wallace's, because he definitely has his own thing going on. I could just as accurately have mentioned Ben Marcus's Notable American Women as a comparative reference, but there are fewer Marcus fans on GR (though I think he's brilliant). Anyway I'm just saying if you're into DFW you will most likely be into this.

This book is weird, but it is accessibly weird, if that makes sense. Jonathan Franzen would probably get annoyed at it for being "difficult" but he would be wrong. It never exactly reveals itself, the reader is never really sure just what kind of book this is, but this condition is due not to authorial withholding so much as the book's general uncategorizableness. It begins as just a sharply written character study with a vague element of mystery, then becomes both weirder and plottier as a kind of existential thriller, then more or less casts off everything that it was before and just exists unidentifiably for a while, then ends as a demented love story. What's consistent is the singularly fucking amazing language, sentences that contort themselves baroquely but logically, prose pleasure on every page. Passages like this and better can be found everywhere:

What was the deep homily of the hundred mercifully distracting police procedurals that could be enjoyed on his television set at any hour of the night or day if it wasn't that there was no thing living or otherwise that was not a potential agent or vessel of the law? The law was in each capillary of the world. He could spit out the window and his spit would be law. Were he launched into space in a transparent plexiglass egg, each cell in his body and every molecule of his surrogate womb would be law, the stars but law's blind eyes gazing at him with cold impartiality.

And great knotty dialogue too, such as: "Stop pretending that being accommodating isn't just a form of aggression" and "I can't tell if you're bullshitting both yourself and me or just me."

From the reviews I've glanced at, some people are taking this book as a satire. I really don't know what they're talking about. Not everything that's funny needs to be a satire for you to praise it, critics. I think it is more an exaggerated fable about the opening up of an outcast, about the life of a painfully sensitive depressive and how a crazy sequence of events renders him possibly slightly more at ease with the world. Ugh, that makes it sound like some kind of awful Manic Pixie Dream Girl romp, which is most assuredly isn't, so just forget I said anything, ever. Point is, the book is really a lot of fun, smart and funny and deeply felt, and I don't know why it isn't a bigger deal. I mean, I'm the first GR user to even review it, what's up with that? I certainly had more fun with this than I am having with the Franzenstein monster at my bedside. Zing! (Also, this book has both a great title and a great cover, so you can't say it is not packaged for your pleasure.)...more

It would be an insult to the boozy soul of this book to write a review while sober, so for now I'll just say that it's a goddamn masterpiece of AmericIt would be an insult to the boozy soul of this book to write a review while sober, so for now I'll just say that it's a goddamn masterpiece of American detective fiction, and the best book I've read this year.

Update: OK, I'm still sober but want to get some thoughts down now, so my apologies to the late Mr. Crumley.

This is a post-detective novel, cut from the same cloth as '70s anti-mystery films like Penn's Night Moves ("Maybe he would find the girl...maybe he would find himself" could be the tagline for this book as well) and Altman's Long Goodbye, dripping in post-Vietnam, post-hippie declining despairing zeitgeist, and engaged in a complex relationship with the conventions and clichés of its hardboiled forebears. Crumley doesn't exactly reject or revise the classic Chandler model of the tough, cynical, morally centered P.I., but he does present us with a detective whose every action is to some degree in reaction to that model. Sughrue, the drunken dick in question, is one conflicted son of a bitch: conflicted between the romantic mythology of his profession and the dirty shitty world he sees around him; between his urge to help the people he's working for/with and his instinct to get the hell out of there and drink himself to forgetting in some anonymous bar; between the remorse he feels over the terrible acts of violence he committed as a soldier in Vietnam and the violence that he can't stop himself from using as leverage in his investigative work. As he tries to track down a flower child ten years missing, he fears succumbing to the cliché of the detective falling in love with his subject: I was like the rest of them now, I suspected, I wanted her to fit my image of her, wanted her back like she might have been, but I feared the truth of it was that she wanted to stay hidden, to live her own life beyond all those clutching desires. Unless she was dead, and if she was, she had already lived the life she made, as best she could. That's obviously gorgeous writing, but it also indicates a level of both self-awareness (he knows he's falling into an old private-eye pattern) and empathy (also knowing that said pattern denies the missing girl her subjectivity and free will) that defines the character and sets him apart from his ancestors.

It so happens that around this vivid protagonist there is a rather brilliant mystery narrative. Crumley maintains a ramshackle, spontaneous vibe even as he fills his story with twists and suspense — including a revelation in the final pages that ends the book on a truly grim, hopeless note — so it should please both the "fuck plot!" and the "plot rules!" factions of crime-fiction appreciation. The setting roams all over the American West, and it's clear that Crumley has probably gone on a few drunken tears across this part of the country himself. And the prose, my god, the prose — Crumley's writing has style and soul and wit, descriptive poetry and zingy dialogue that would make Elmore Leonard cry, a damaged voice that's what you'd expect if Philip Marlowe went to Vietnam and came back to a broken world as a broken man. The other characters are great, too, especially the alcoholic writer Trahearne who is at once Sughrue's target, drinking buddy, ward, betrayer, sidekick and arch-nemesis.

Man, I just fucking love this book. It's insane that there has never been a film adaptation, so I hereby announce my intention to write and direct one myself, to star Walton Goggins as Sughrue and John Slattery as Trahearne. Open casting call for the female roles — message me, ladies!...more

So it's October, and that's when you're supposed to read horror fiction, right? And I always feel like I should be reading horror, should be uneartOy.

So it's October, and that's when you're supposed to read horror fiction, right? And I always feel like I should be reading horror, should be unearthing the good stuff, because I like horror movies and in theory the genre appeals to me, but in practice I have never really come across a horror novel that has served my particular literary needs. Unless you count Shirley Jackson, which I guess I don't, because the only genre she belongs to is the genre of the fucking sublime.

But I sometimes give it a go this time of year. My 2011 attempt began with the '70s voodoo-curse thingy All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By (which my fingers almost just typed as All Hands on the Bad One, a Sleater-Kinney album that would be a better use of your time than reading that John Farris book). It wasn't really actively bad, just pretty dumb and unsatisfying, so I didn't/don't have much to say about it. Undeterred, I moved on to what turned out to be a much worse piece of shit, namely this book. 0 for 2.

"Piece of shit" is unfair, I guess. It's fairly ambitious, certainly not hackwork, but it is a spectacular failure. I was intrigued by the Southern Gothic comparisons, the weird title, the conjoined-twins hook, even the text of the first page. But Piccirilli simply does not have the prose skill to support this kind of book, a plotless mood-piece about a bizarre backwater swamp town where everyone is various shades of fucked-up/violent/sex-crazed/insane/scarred/depraved/etc. There are a bunch of different plot threads involving the protagonist's affairs with different crazies, but there is absolutely no narrative engine to the book, no tension, no stakes — and the "mood" being cultivated is totally ersatz and transparent and ineffective, and Piccirilli just isn't capable of style at the level he reaches for, so there is really no reason to turn the pages at any time, no matter how much fucked up shit happens (ultimately not even that much; the creepy conjoined triplets with a single brain don't even do anything, they're just in the background for the first few chapters and then pretty much disappear). It's all just a pretentious mess, and certainly nothing remotely close to "scary" (though I'd have settled for "readable"). As for the publisher and reviewers who dropped Queen Flannery O'Connor's name in conjunction with this book, I hope they have trouble sleeping at night.

Horror and I will one day have a blissful union, but it didn't happen this time....more

I'm torn between rolling my eyes at Eggers' inflated paranoia and nodding my head at his thorough diagnosis of digital trends.

It should probably be acI'm torn between rolling my eyes at Eggers' inflated paranoia and nodding my head at his thorough diagnosis of digital trends.

It should probably be accepted upfront that as a literary work The Circle is basically worthless. Protagonist Mae rarely behaves like a recognizable human being, let alone an interesting one; the prose, dialogue, and symbolism (a shark!) rarely rise above YA level; and in case you aren't able to draw your own conclusions about the implications of social media run absurdly amok, Eggers is happy to provide a didactic assist. I've never read his fiction before, so I don't know if Eggers is always this bad at the fundamentals or if he intentionally simplified everything this time in order to push his ideological agenda as clearly as possible. I suspect the latter.

Actually, the agenda doesn't take over the novel until after its midpoint. The first half of The Circle is as much a critique of modern white-collar workplace culture as of anything directly related to technology. It's almost an update of the Hank Scorpio episode of The Simpsons, wherein the family leaves Springfield so Homer can work for a seemingly perfect, nice-guy boss who turns out to be a James Bond supervillain. The tone is humorless, so I wouldn't call it satire, but Eggers' quiver is full as he surveys the faux-friendly, hyper-sensitive, multi-screened, Kafkaesque ins and outs of being a cog in a giant tech company's grinding wheel. This section follows the Catch-22 template of dissecting institutional madness, albeit much more dryly. It's smooth reading, though, and I found myself genuinely frustrated or shocked at exactly the moments Eggers wanted me to react thus.

But the book's second half resembles nothing so much as 1950s anti-Communist agitprop, complete with dire it could happen here warnings of totalitarianism come to America. I'm sympathetic to many of Eggers' concerns about social media and techno-hegemony -- he does a good job, especially in the first half, of revealing how silly, regressive, and commercially corrupted much of our online lives are -- but I have a hard time seeing anything beyond fantasy in his presentation of an evil empire dead-set on eliminating all forms of privacy and using social media as a foothold to world domination. Just because it's pure fantasy doesn't mean it's not fun to think about, of course. What The Circle lacks in literary value it makes up for in imaginative meticulousness. But the even-a-kid-can-comprehend-it lack of subtlety indicates to me that Eggers wants this book (its latter half, at least) to be seen as a serious cautionary tale rather than a what-if lark. From that angle it verges on the ridiculous, and in the future will probably be seen as analogous to postwar Red Menace fear-mongering....more

Shirley Jackson was such a kooky genius. Emphasis on genius. Also, emphasis on kooky.

I'm learning that there is a whole world of Shirleyana beyond thShirley Jackson was such a kooky genius. Emphasis on genius. Also, emphasis on kooky.

I'm learning that there is a whole world of Shirleyana beyond that one story which shall remain nameless because everyone read it in high school.

The premise of this one is simple but also highly bizarre. A wealthy family, plus assorted hangers-on, waits around in a big old house for what they believe to be the imminent apocalypse. Most of the family members are pretty awful in one way or another, and they mostly hate each other. The novel chronicles their interactions as they wait for a premonition to come true and plan for the paradisiacal new world that supposedly awaits them.

Also, it's funny.

The neat irony at the center of Jackson's style here is how all the characters comport themselves with extreme decorum and refinement, yet at the same time are openly hostile toward each other. It makes for a lot of dryly hilarious dialogue and devious plotting.

Another impressive thing Jackson does is to render irrelevant the question of whether the end of the world is "real" and whether the characters are crazy for believing in it. There is no authorial judgment of the characters; the point is that they believe in this thing, for various reasons, and it doesn't matter if we believe it. And they do have their reasons: leadership opportunities, spiritual connection with dead loved ones, fear of non-paradisiacal life lived as a failure, or the simple power of Pascal's wager.

Speaking of those characters, they are wonderfully drawn--especially for such a short novel. My favorite is the world-weary, self-deprecatingly witty Essex, who I could easily see being played by George Sanders. (In fact, almost all the characters come off as British--I guess mid-20th-century pseudo-aristocratic Americans acted rather Britishly). And it's impossible not to love the family's wicked matriarch Mrs. Halloran, who takes charge of the family's post-apocalyptic planning with extreme prejudice. (In one of the book's funniest details, Mrs. Halloran insists on wearing a crown during a party given at the house, and thereafter into the new world.)

Amid all this there is at least one nail-biting suspense set piece, involving a character's attempted escape from the house. Since the rest of the book is relatively uneventful, plotwise, that one sequence really sticks out as a tour-de-force. There's also one really funny sequence involving another group of eschaton-hopefuls, whose belief system hinges on salvation courtesy little green men from outer space.

I don't think it's too spoiler-y to say that the book ends on a note of ambiguity. My immediate reaction to this was annoyance, but after some thought I realized the ending is perfect. As Maureen put it in her lovely review, the ending one might crave would have to be a whole other book. It's so much more tantalizing and frightening to imagine the possibilities that Jackson leaves open.

I'm holding back on five stars because there is one exposition-y section earlyish in the book that is, as far as I can tell, completely extraneous on both a narrative and a thematic level. I kept thinking it was gonna pay off, and it never did. But that's really a nitpick. Call it 4.75 stars. Regardless, it's an unclassifiable, largely unheralded work that really deserves to be back in print. Check your local libraries, folks....more

The Invisible Bridge is a WWII epic like every other WWII epiRomance! Persecution! War! Tragedy! More romance! Bloated length in surplus of 500 pages!

The Invisible Bridge is a WWII epic like every other WWII epic you've ever encountered, the kind of big-ass tale that David Lean or Anthony Minghella would've loved to get their cinematic mitts on—Dr. Zhivago as imagined by a hip Brooklyn cutie. Reviews have been hyperbolically ecstatic, but why? I guess there's stuff to admire here: the heavy-duty plotting is assured and largely engaging, and there's enough superficial gravity for a dozen Oscar-baiting film adaptations. Indeed, literary Oscar-bait is the most succinct phrase I can think of to describe Orringer's book: a technically accomplished but bloodless epic, conducted with the utmost politesse, that reaches straight for the middle.

At all times, this book is about its surface story and nothing else. We follow the travails of a young Jewish Hungarian man as he moves to Paris to study architecture, falls in love with an older woman (a woman with a mysterious past!), gets called back to Hungary to serve in labor companies during the war, endures various shades of Holocaust-related hardship, and is reunited with (the surviving members of) his family, all of whom move to America where they live happily ever after. U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!

OK, so you can glibly reduce any narrative to its barest plot outline and make it sound silly. But in this case, that's pretty much all there is —the rest is an endless barrage of details rendered in blandly utilitarian prose. No subtext, all text—and so goddamn much of it! Every major character is kind and well-behaved, while unkind characters are relegated to marginal villainy; Orringer has no room for moral ambiguity. Look, I know I'm being harsh, but the fact is that you've heard this story before, and when Orringer drags out the old "we must tell the stories of the Holocaust so future generations will understand" chestnut, well—sure, that logic is unassailable vis-a-vis education and intra-family storytelling, but it doesn't necessarily apply to art anymore. If you're going to tell a story about the suffering of Jews during WWII, you had better find a fresh angle. One reason why Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds was such a breath of fresh air was QT's refusal to treat his sacrosanct material with kid gloves—the movie plays more like a Spaghetti Western than a respectable middlebrow product, and that unexpected perspective allowed him to tell a story with more verve and poignance in any one of its five chapters than in the whole of The Invisible Bridge. To cite just one example, Orringer seems afraid of actually writing about death, despite her chosen milieu; she shoehorns nearly all of the story's tragic events into a single brief chapter, glossing over them quickly on the way to the forthcoming happy reunion. Contrast this with the unforgettable scene in Basterds where Shoshanna and Zoller meet their fates in the projection booth. An unfair comparison? Well, I'm talking about works from two different mediums here, so yeah, kind of. But Tarantino's film ought to be the standard-bearer for any contemporary artist who wants to tell a story about Jews in World War II. And this book doesn't measure up.

Listen, I'm not heartless, and the Jews are my people. Identity-related empathy is probably what kept me reading to the finish line. Scattered moments and passages in this book affected me. But that has virtually nothing to do with Orringer's artistry and everything to do with being made to face some of history's ugly truths. Which I don't need a mediocre 600-page novel to remind me of, really.

BTW, full credit for that "Mittelbräu" joke goes to Michael Sicinski. What, you thought I was clever enough to come up with a gem like that myself?...more

Mr. Peanut is the novel of the moment, or one of the novels of one of the moments, anyway, and while I'm not completely in the tank, I am absolutely gMr. Peanut is the novel of the moment, or one of the novels of one of the moments, anyway, and while I'm not completely in the tank, I am absolutely glad that the book has received so much positive attention. It deserves it.

As America's happiest blurbwhore Stephen King helpfully clues us in on, this is a book about the dark side of marriage. Not the suburban-anomie American Beauty/Revolutionary Road kind of dark side, but the kind of dark side that involves straight-up murdering your spouse—or at least considering the possibility. I have to say, I found this willingness to "go there" highly refreshing. Anyone can write a story about infidelity and the quiet desperation of a relationship gone stale. It takes a little more testicular fortitude to write a story about murder and set it in that same thematic universe of unresolved sighing.

The most frequent complaints about Mr. Peanut by naysayers stem from the book's "disjointed" storytelling or its "postmodern" structure of overlapping, echoing narratives. And all I can really do in response to that is shrug. If you're a James Woodite who's not on board with anything but straightforward psychological realism, then by all means erect a stubborn wall between yourself and this inventive, moving, perfectly accessible novel. Also, no offense, but maybe go fuck yourself? I mean, this isn't some heady, obtuse, pomo fuckaround; its narrative quirks are purposeful, thematically united, and in service of the book's ultimate emotional/narrative payoff, which is staggering and devastating and perfectly executed even if you've more or less guessed the "twist," such as it is.

It's best not to know much of the story in advance; by now you've picked up keywords like marriage, murder and unconventional narrative structure, and it would be wrong to reveal anything more specifically. Suffice to say that I think Ross pulls off his intricate narrative project on the macro level.

On the micro level, though, I have some reservations that keep the book in "very good" territory for me rather than "great," which reservations fall under one of two categories, going too far or missing the mark. Well, really only one instance of missing the mark: a set-piece that attempts to mine some suspense from a possible near-death experience. Despite the author's and the characters' fixation with Hitchcock, this is not really a novel of suspense, nor is it a set-piece-y one in general. So I found myself emptily turning pages in this section, barely registering sentences' meaning, waiting for Ross to get this out-of-place bit of perfunctory plotting out of the way. As for going too far, the primary instance of this, and my primary beef with the book, is the teeth-grindingly overlong section focusing on...well, I don't want to get into plot info, but it's an extended detour set in the past, going into near-absurd levels of minute detail about some not-that-compelling stuff. I get why this section's in the book—it's part of the echoey, deja-vu effect that enhances the book's ghoulish take on marriage—but it could have been half as long, or maybe even shorter than that, and still achieved the desired effect. Frankly, it's a terrible bore, and if Ross hadn't rallied for such a fantastic ending I might have been inclined toward a more ambivalent three-star review. Contrast this section with its mirror—the one about Ward Hastroll, you can just file that name away since I still don't want to get into plot specifics. Hastroll's section is so much more concise and dramatic and strange and fascinating and even suspenseful that it makes this other section seem all the more inflated and mundane. The Hastroll bit could almost stand on its own. Just a fantastic piece of writing there. But anyway, going too far—there's a bit involving a seminar on Hitchcock that is certainly interesting but not really germane to the book. I would not disagree with the word self-indulgent being applied there. Ditto a lengthy description of a prospective video game—cool, but I'm not sure why it's here.

Mr. Peanut is a shape-shifter, constantly adjusting and correcting and obfuscating the reader's perception of what exactly this book is. After the first 100 pages, I thought I was reading something like what I wanted Lars von Trier's Antichrist to be: a horror story in which the bogeyman is marriage itself. 100 pages later, I had cast that thesis aside and was deep in a head-scratching fog. And at the end, I understood that my initial idea wasn't completely off the mark, but that there was more to it, involving some pretty deep sadness, and how we seek solace in the creation and consumption of art, and how some sadness is too deep even for art to ameliorate. I wish it had been edited with a bit more scrutiny, but this is a really a damn good book that you should read.

P.S. I love the jacket description's little tagline: "a police procedural of the soul." It walks the line between cheesy and accurately awesome, not unlike my favorite movie tagline ever, for Arthur Penn's 1975 detective film Night Moves: "Maybe he would find the girl...maybe he would find himself."...more

Damn good, despite obstacles: a little overfamiliar in its coming-of-age business, a little irritating in its perspectival caprices. But the book is cDamn good, despite obstacles: a little overfamiliar in its coming-of-age business, a little irritating in its perspectival caprices. But the book is consistently smart and enjoyable over its 600+ pages; better yet, it's a nimble shapeshifter, fluctuating between comedy and tragedy, levity and profundity, without weakening either tonal pole or making too much mess. Murray manages to go deep and go sad without sacrificing the book's breezy, buoyant momentum. Not an easy trick to pull off, and he deserves a lot of credit for making it work.

(I should note that whatever problems I may have had with the book are partly traceable to the contextual whiplash caused by a couple of detours I took to other novels while in the middle of this one, namely Jesse Ball's mind-tickling Samedi the Deafness and Tom McCarthy's mind-blowing Remainder. These terrific novels so stimulated my brain that Skippy's lunges for my heart didn't always land.)

The book also got me thinking, in a peculiar way, about genre. When J.D. Salinger wrote The Catcher in the Rye half a dozen decades ago, he couldn't have predicted that he'd be launching a full-blown Genre -- as codified, artificial and durable as the black-hat western or the hard-boiled mystery. I realize that a long tradition of bildungsromans preceded Catcher, but modern practitioners of the coming-of-age story owe a major debt to Salinger that they don't really owe to, say, Studs Lonigan, so I think it's safe to diagnose Holden Caulfield as Patient Zero of this particular strain. While I was reading Skippy Dies, I went to see Richard Ayoade's Submarine, a pretty good coming-of-age film that gooses the genre with just enough stylistic brio and critical self-awareness to feel fresh rather than rehashed. Other neo-Holden narratives are less resourceful: I skipped The Art of Getting By (released just one week after Submarine opened in Chicago!) but A.O. Scott dismissed it (and the overexposure of the genre in question) with this awesomely acidic opening line: "Someday every overprivileged, misunderstood high school boy who has ever come of age in New York will have his own movie, and one good thing about The Art of Getting By is that it brings that day, the day we can move on to other matters, a little closer." That's a great zinger, but it also speaks to the weariness (and wariness) that many of us feel toward this familiar narrative pattern, whether on the page or the screen.

The fallacy of the coming-of-age story is its denial of what should be an obvious truth: human beings "come of" every age. It's not like you turn 25 and suddenly have it all figured out. (I should know, having turned 25 last month and feeling less wise than ever.) We're constantly adapting and trying to figure out just what the hell we're supposed to be doing. That condition is not unique to adolescence, and the pernicious fictions of this genre may be the ones that pretend otherwise. One reason why Rushmore was and is such a revelatory jumpstart to this genre is its implicit suggestion that Bill Murray's character has been puttering around for the last 30 years under the same shroud of foggy delusion and melancholy as the film's teenage protagonist. See also The Squid and the Whale's emphasis on the complicatedly assholish father and the tension generated by the son's possible -- but not yet definite -- inheritance of said assholish qualities. I guess what I'm saying is that a good coming-of-age story makes room for something larger than itself, something beyond the well-established micro-verities of Teens Learning About Life & Love as represented by that meaningless yet unforgettable Blink-182 refrain, "I guess this is growing up."

Skippy Dies, more overtly than most narratives of its ilk, strives for this sense of something bigger than teen angst. Something really bigger, as in, like, cosmic, looking toward a multidimensional theory of the universe called "M-theory", as well as obscure histories of the first world war. Characters' private obsessions provide our access to these expansions, while Murray does a nice job of drawing them into the text with parallels and thematic resonance without being overly transparent. There's further expansion in the large cast of characters, sometimes excessively so: Murray perhaps foolhardily insists on limning the consciousnesses of nearly everyone who plays even a minor role in the drama. There were too many occasions, throughout my reading, when I wanted Murray to quit hovering around a single character's perspective and retreat to the God's-eye POV he uses too sparingly; the book is never better than when Murray steps back and provides an all-seeing overview of the boarding-school community at large. (See the chapter from pages 277-280, about the boys' preparations for a concert audition, for a sterling example of what I wanted more of.)

But Murray seems determined to pose the question of just who exactly is coming of age here, and when it works, this wide-net-casting does help him transcend the limitations of the genre -- sort of. Even with the expansions, there's very little here that's new or surprising; but even without the expansions, Murray's sharp wit and perspicacity would probably still carry Skippy to the finish line with charm and wisdom to spare. He sings a familiar song but adds a few verses, tweaks the lyrics so they're funnier, throws in a weird bridge, and croons in a voice that could shame a nightingale. Still, he adopts too many other voices along the way, and none of them can quite sing loud enough to drown out the choral drone of genre. But that's no big deal, really. I guess this is growing up....more

Finally finished this ginormous tome, after dipping in and out of it for months. I have mixed feelings. Subject matter's fascinating, of course: radicFinally finished this ginormous tome, after dipping in and out of it for months. I have mixed feelings. Subject matter's fascinating, of course: radical abolitionist and Christian fundamentalist John Brown raises his family to be a cult of anti-slavery soldiers, culminating in the failed attempt at a slave revolt in Harpers Ferry, VA, one of the big "road to the Civil War" events in your American history textbooks. The big unasked/unanswered question the book poses is this: why did it take a religious nutjob kamikaze terrorist to take serious action against slavery? There were other white abolitionists, of course, but they were basically journalists and theoreticians, not men of action. The only white dude in America to hold true moral convictions about the evil of slavery was a mad dervish who murdered innocent people, then led himself and his sons on a Wild Bunch-style suicide mission.

Banks tells the tale from the perspective of Brown's son Owen, the only surviving member of the family circa the turn of the 20th century. The book is pretty much split between the story itself and Owen's running commentary on the story, in which he interjects thoughts about race relations in 19th-century America and the complex father-son relationship between Owen and the "Old Man," as he was known. (The three big themes running through the book are race, religion and daddy issues.) This running commentary is consistently interesting and beautifully written, Owen writing as an old hermit whose every waking minute is haunted by the past events he's relating. But the story itself...eeennnhhhh, I dunno. I'm not at all convinced it needed to take up 750 pages, I'll say that much. Episodes involving John Brown's financial woes are so boring it almost seems like a deliberate joke of boringness. When it finally gets to the killing -- first in the "Bleeding Kansas" wars to determine whether Kansas territory would go free or slave, then in Harpers Ferry -- the book gets bogged down in action sequences, which Banks doesn't write particularly well. But the reflections, the meta-story, made me think long and hard about race and family life in the 19th century, and the broader connection to today's religiously motivated terrorism is clear.

For Owen's voice, Banks adopts a purposefully stilted prose style meant to imitate both the general windbaggedness of 19th-century verbiage and John Brown's Biblical oratory. This style is often grating, and it's not without anachronistic usage, but it does help to immerse the reader in the world, and after living with the book for a while I found myself weirdly attached to the voice. What it comes down to is there's a lot of good juicy stuff here, but there's also waaaay too much padding. I believe this could have been a damn good, verging-on-great novel if Banks had kept it somewhere in the 300-400 page range....more

I finished this two weeks ago and I can't get it out of my head. The blunt-force terror of the abrupt ending haunts me, the characters and their miserI finished this two weeks ago and I can't get it out of my head. The blunt-force terror of the abrupt ending haunts me, the characters and their miseries and their desperation and their awful milieu imprinted on my brain. Newton Thornburg's Cutter and Bone is a bleak masterpiece and I can't recommend it more highly to those of you who are predisposed to love bleak masterpieces. Anyone who doesn't love heroic bleakness, just fuck off.

The cineastes among my GR circle may have seen the 1981 film Cutter's Way, based on this novel. It is commonly cited as the swansong of the '70s paranoid-thriller genre and has become a cult favorite, not without reason. John Heard's performance as the irreparably damaged Vietnam vet Alex Cutter is so great that you will sadly wonder why his career never really went anywhere afterwards. (Biggest mistake the Sopranos writers ever made was killing off Heard's corrupt cop in season one.) But good as the movie is, it only scratches the surface of the depressing perfection of the book, and boy does it have the wrong fucking ending. So I deem the film optional and the novel absolutely essential.

The story. It's the '70s, and the zeitgeist is crawling with the traumas of Vietnam. Cutter's been home a while but he's a total mess, crippled physically and psychologically, constantly putting on a show of psycho theatrics, ranting and raving and lashing out at the world. His odd-couple buddy Richard Bone (like Marty and Doc in Back to the Future, it's never really clear how these two became friends) is a sleazy pretty-boy bum who walked out on his middle-class family life to work a gigolo racket and sponge off Cutter's meager resources. One night Bone witnesses somebody dumping a dead body in a trashcan, Cutter gets the idea it might've been this prominent tycoon, and suddenly he has something to put his energies toward besides suicide, i.e. blackmail (or whatever). From this point the guys spiral down to the bottom, not before taking some others with them. Cutter's wife Mo is the closest thing the book has to a moral voice, but of course she's a near-nihilistic junkie who neglects her kid.

Cutter's mania is terrifyingly convincing. Thornburg gives him a brief, amazing monologue related to the photos of the My Lai massacre that's gotta be one of the high-water marks of dialogue in 20th century American literature. I won't spoil it here though George Pelecanos does in his reverent intro to this edition. The prose snaps throughout, an unembellished journalistic style so unflinching it borders on sadism at times. Cutter and Bone barrel toward their destiny and Thornburg follows them. The ending is correct.

So, this is pretty fuggin' fantastic. My first Powers--I've always resisted, thinking of him as literature's Bill Nye the Science Guy or something. AnSo, this is pretty fuggin' fantastic. My first Powers--I've always resisted, thinking of him as literature's Bill Nye the Science Guy or something. And maybe he is. And maybe that's not such a bad thing.

Some might complain that there's too much stuff packed into this novel's relatively slim, 295-page frame. We've got five (or six) major characters. There's Russell, the depressive writer/editor/teacher; Candace, the therapist and Russell's love interest; Thassa, the young Algerian woman in Russell's class who captivates every other character and sets the plot in motion with her seemingly preternatural glow of happiness; Thomas, the hotshot scientist specializing in genetic research who takes a (too?) keen interest in Thassa's case; and Tonia, the TV journalist who doesn't exactly have a clear reason for being in the book except to be a foil for the scientist, with whom she engages in a series of televised interviews. And lurking behind them all is Mr. Disembodied Authorial Presence (henceforth Mr. DAP), a metafictional narrator. (More on him later.) But boy, there are goodies on every dense page. An aesthetic and intellectual feast, this novel.

Generosity is at its most compelling when it focuses on the Russell-Thassa-Candace triangle. The other two are pretty much plot/theme devices rather than fleshed-out characters, but Powers knows this (Mr. DAP lets us know he knows it, at one point), and it's a sin I had little trouble forgiving. If character-as-mouthpiece has been a stumbling block for you in the past, it might trip you up here w/r/t Thomas and Tonia--but that's only if Powers fails to hypnotize you with the stylish richness of his prose and the nonstop deluge of his complicated ideas. Which he won't. The scientist represents a possible future in which happiness, as well as any other human trait, is a malleable and marketable commodity. He isn't exactly the villain of the piece--I don't think Powers cares enough about him as a character for that--but he could be. If Russell were the narrator instead of Mr. DAP, Thomas the "transhumanist" would be pretty near mustache-twirling in his villainy.

Lemme address Mr. DAP. At first I was thinking, okay, this is just kind of a goofy (but well-done) metafiction trick of the kind we're all pretty well familiar with--commenting on the characters and the action as "he" "creates" them. But it actually does have some thematic relevance. See, the issue of "the happiness gene" (essentially this book's MacGuffin) raises questions about free will and determinism (Powers studiously avoids these terms, maybe because they're too obvious), nature vs. nature, and the like. If our entire personality, and thus our choices and actions, is coded in our genetic make-up, then how can we be the authors of our own lives? Mr. DAP is trying to be the author of a group of fictional lives--fiction being, theoretically, a way for us to exercise some absolute control over someone's destiny, even if haven't any over our own. But the joke here is that Mr. DAP can't even sustain authorship of these fake lives. He becomes more of an observer than an author--at one point, Thassa says something in Arabic and Mr. DAP mentions that he translated it "later." And there are other instances like that, and various references to Mr. DAP passively watching the characters do things. Even in fiction, agency is slippery.

Powers also wants this to be a Way We Live Now novel, and it's there that he runs into a wee bit of awkwardness with constant references to the virtual life of the internet. (A paragraph about a character's Facebook page contains the unfortunate sentence, "Her pokes exploded.") Powers isn't exactly the writing staff of 30 Rock when it comes to being glib about stuff like this, but he does have a strong grasp of how information exchange has changed so dramatically in the past decade, and he integrates that into the plot quite plausibly. There's even an Oprah analogue ("Oona"--weirdly, also the name of a character from Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City), and the paragraph describing her importance is maybe the best thing I've ever read about Oprah. Powers is a frighteningly smart dude, and he's very much in touch with contemporary culture. And he wants us to know it. Pretty refreshing, actually, with so many intellectuals of a certain age hiding with tail betwixt legs at the mere thought of engaging with our modern mores and info-overload. There's no looking backward for Powers.

And the great thing is that there's nothing clinical about this. It's a very emotional book, both despite and because of the science. Thassa is such a great character--at first she seems like a fantasy, someone you have to suspend your disbelief to buy as real, but Powers slowly cracks the shell, and by the outstanding third act...well, let me quote David Cross's parody of James Lipton: "And no one was left unmoved!" Powers shares Bill Nye's gift for making science palatable to the layperson, but Bill Nye never made me cry. I'll be reading more Powers, hopefully soon....more

I dunno, guys. This is...not trashier, but shallower than I expected. It is basically a bloated Elmore Leonard caper novel in Victorian clothing, withI dunno, guys. This is...not trashier, but shallower than I expected. It is basically a bloated Elmore Leonard caper novel in Victorian clothing, with a feminist POV and a deceptively dour tone. It's not bad at all, but I was expecting something meatier. The length isn't really justified, either; after a dynamite first act it gets seriously draggy in the remaining two thirds. OTOH, the period milieu is totally convincing and the dialogue is great. But I wouldn't give this more than a shrugging half-recommendation....more

William Gibson wrote something not long ago -- well, tweeted something, actually -- that has haunted me unexpectedly. Speaking of the sea change in AmWilliam Gibson wrote something not long ago -- well, tweeted something, actually -- that has haunted me unexpectedly. Speaking of the sea change in American culture brought by World War II, Gibson noted that "WWII Americans looked like us; 1935 Americans seriously didn't." Somehow, this statement is totally accurate. If the past since WWII is a foreign country, the past before WWII is an alien planet.

Graham Greene wasn't an American, of course, but the same mysterious principle applied across the pond. Greene's Brighton Rock is a pre-war novel by a writer primarily known for his postwar output, and as such it is constructed from cultural and verbal materials shockingly different from those composing his later efforts. This strangeness enhances the sense of alienation and ineffable evil afflicting Pinkie Brown, the teenage killer, wannabe gang-leader, and perverse poster-boy for Catholicism at the center of the story. Greene was at least to some degree a devout Catholic himself, but my reading of Brighton Rock paints an awfully ugly picture of the faith: it can conceive only of Good and Evil, not of Right and Wrong; if you resign yourself to damnation -- as do Pinkie and his accidental girlfriend Rose, one of the most tragic characters in any literature I know of -- then you're bound by no code, unburdened by any conscience, capable and willing to execute any misdeed. No one toggled between a ripping good yarn and deeper thematic resonances better than Greene, and to read Brighton Rock is to see him discovering this methodology under the circumstances of exquisitely intense material. The prose is thicker, more of an obstacle than in other Greene, owing to the nature of pre-war discourse -- as foreign as the physical appearances in the photos troubling William Gibson -- but by no means unbeautiful.

I've not yet seen either the 1947 film version (evidently very good) or this year's remake (out soon in the U.S. and receiving tepid reviews so far), both of which apparently alter the ending in a manner that arguably improves on Greene's (I read spoilers for the films), although the final sentence of this book is pretty amazing. As a gangster drama, a romantic tragedy, and an (unintentional?) attack on Catholic values, and certainly on various other levels as well, this deserves its rep....more

I bet I'd be really inspired by this novel if I were a fiction writer. Mary Gaitskill sees the world through no eyes but her own, and she communicatesI bet I'd be really inspired by this novel if I were a fiction writer. Mary Gaitskill sees the world through no eyes but her own, and she communicates that worldview with an unyielding series of remarkably inventive metaphors and physical descriptions, interspersed with prose-poem reveries in which Gaitskill abandons standard literary psychology to focus entirely on texture. Heady stuff, and my inner creative-writing student is all fired up by it, galvanized. But alas, I am not a writer of fiction, merely a reader, with all the reader's selfish, automatic appetite for narrative conveyance. Gaitskill is less interested in moving from A to B than she is in wringing all the physical and emotional meaning out of A before collapsing, exhausted, onto B. Thus the book frustrated me as often as it thrilled me.

Semi-coincidentally, this is the second novel I've read this summer about a fashion model. While the protagonists of both Look at Me and Veronica are changed by the fashion world, I can't say that either book is really about modeling. Egan uses it as a vehicle to explore themes of identity and culture; Gaitskill seems interested in it more abstractly, as one source of the memories that protagonist-narrator Alison dips in and out of throughout the book. Veronica is most interesting in the last 50-70 pages, when the relationship between Alison and the titular character—a brassy old dame, sure to be played by Patricia Clarkson in a theoretical movie version, who's dying of AIDS—comes to the forefront. In this section, Gaitskill eases up on the prose-poem digressions and the non-linearity, as if to reward the reader's hard work by finishing up with a relatively conventional two-hander character piece. And it is devastating.

The reality of the '80s AIDS crisis is difficult to comprehend for those of us who are too young to have consciously lived through it. I'd never really given any serious thought to the matter until I saw HBO's great miniseries adaptation of Tony Kushner's play Angels in America, and I thought about it again when I saw André Téchiné's great film The Witnesses. The genocidal cruelty of it, the fact that it was basically a holocaust wrought by nature to wipe out an already-persecuted group...one day you're a healthy young person living your life, and the next day you're dying of a mysterious disease and watching your friends die from it too, and meanwhile a big chunk of mainstream society is clucking its tongue and judging you for bringing it on yourself with your deviant behavior. It takes nuanced, sensitive art to help us understand the enormity of such a calamity, and I'd add Veronica to this shortlist of works that made AIDS real for me—all the more impressive since Gaitskill spends virtually no time dwelling on the physical nature of Veronica's illness. But the character herself, as seen through the memories of Alison, is vivid, and the act of watching Alison watch her die, rather than create distance, somehow makes the sadness of it more acute.

But again, all this stuff happens toward the end of the book, and the preceding pages are an uphill battle. Sometimes the book even verges on self-parody, and I rolled my eyes at more than a few of Gaitskill's overripe abstractions. So to evaluate the gestalt of the book I can't bring myself to give it more than three stars. Maybe I'm too tough a grader. (Or maybe I just gravitate toward the three-star rating too often out of equivocation; just as I don't have the guts to give this book four stars, I didn't have the guts to give Mitchell's Ghostwritten the two-star rating I really felt it deserved.) But I do think the work it demands the reader put it in is, largely, worthwhile; as an example of the book at its singular best, I reproduce this fantastic sentence: "He moves like he's being yelled at by invisible people whom he hates but whom he basically agrees with."...more